Guy Kawasaki Keynote at SESNY 2009 -By Shawn Collins

The keynote address from Guy Kawasaki, “Nobodies are the New Somebodies,” at SESNY 2009 was about how Twitter can be used as a marketing tool.

Here are the key points from Guy’s talk…

Forget the A-list – it is vastly overrated.

De-focus – you don’t know who will be your most important followers.

Get lots of followers

Guy related how Robert Scoble told him to auto-follow anybody that follows him, and he uses SocialToo to do this. He never unfollows people.

He explained that the reason he auto-follows everybody is his lack of arrogance, and so that everybody can direct message him.

But then he went into a sanctimonious rant, which seems to be common with the preachers of auto-follow, that it’s somehow wrong to only follow certain people vs. all.

He went on to say that he doesn’t actually read the full Twitter-stream of those followers, but does respond to all DM’s and @ replies.

So, he follows everybody out of a lack of arrogance, but can’t be bothered to read what they are Tweeting unless it involves him? So why is that morally superior to following a smaller core of people and actually reading all their Tweets?

Whatever.

Some tools he mentioned to keep score of his follower tally: TwitterCounter, Twitalyzer, and Twitter Penis.

Guy cites a steady stream of useful content as key to continually bring on new followers.

One of his strategies is to go to StumbleUpon and Alltop to find stuff there to Tweet. He uses Adjix to shorten and track his URLs. In addition to tracking, it has a scheduling function and a Firefox bookmarklet.

This helps to get people to ReTweet posts, and he also uses Retweetist to monitor RT’s.

Monitor what people are saying about you

Guy monitors the following query on Twitter search: guykawasaki OR alltop -alltop.com

Copy

Watch what other companies are doing and emulate their success on Twitter. But how to figure out who to copy? See twibs.com to track what companies are doing on Twitter.

Some examples of good corporate accounts on Twitter:
@comcastcares
@jetblue
@amazondeals
@cirquelasvegas

Search

Guy talked about how he didn’t really get Twitter until somebody showed him Summize and the ability to search.

Examples of finding people in certain geographic areas for business leads:

scion near:10019 within:100mi
seo near:10019 within:100mi

Get the tools

Guy uses TweetDeck, though he doesn’t like the limitation of monitoring one account at a time. So, he also uses Twhirl, so he can monitor and post with two accounts: @guykawasaki and @alltop.

He explained that @alltop is for him to spam and @guykawasaki is for him to push good links.

CoTweet was also mentioned as a tool for companies where multiple people need to be in a Twitter account.

Squeeze the trigger

He prefaced this one by saying it was bound to be controversial; TwitterHawk.com, which enables you to set up searches and then automatically post tweets to respond to other Tweets with your keywords in them.

He joked that it is the “ultimate spamming tool”. Not sure what the joke is there – that’s exactly what it is.
Guy gave an example where whenever there is a search for Britney Spears, he auto-posts to tell people to go to a page on Alltop about Britney.

He opts to manually approve the Tweets, so they don’t go to people that are Tweeting negatively about a given subject, because these posts cost $0.05 each.

Guy mentioned that Twitterhawk records when you’ve sent a Tweet to somebody, so you don’t send more than one to them.

Make it easy to share

Have a link on your site to share content on Twitter – he has these on AllTop.

Also, he uses Twitterfeed to enable people to sign up to have his Alltop News Feed posts appear in their Twitter account. So far, 590 people have opted for this feature.

And, Guy claims lots of people have told him that they have more conversations going on, because of his auto-Tweets, as they are more interesting than their own Tweets. Sad.

He mentioned that he got a custom setup from Twitterfeed, and thinks it is a good option if you have lots of evangelists.

Take the heat: UFM

Guy finished with his perspective that if somebody doesn’t like your tweets, tell them: UFM = unfollow me.
Lastly, his take on spam is that if he does it, it’s clever marketing. If somebody does it to him, it’s spam.

LOL. Unfollow.

Shawn is a Co-founder of Affiliate Summit and Co-Editor-in-Chief of FeedFront Magazine.